The Little Friend

“Well, Harriet,” said Edie briskly, when Harriet turned up, late, at her back door for breakfast. “Where have you been? We missed you at church yesterday.”

She untied her apron, without taking notice of Harriet’s silence or even of the rumpled daisy dress. She was in an unusually chipper mood, for Edie, and she was all dressed up, in a navy-blue summer suit and spectator pumps to match.

“I was about to start without you,” she said, as she sat down to her toast and coffee. “Is Allison coming? I’m going to a meeting.”

“Meeting of what?”

“At the church. Your aunts and I are going on a trip.”

This was news, even in Harriet’s dazed state. Edie and the aunts never went anywhere. Libby had scarcely even been outside Mississippi; and she and the other aunts were gloomy and terrified for days if they had to venture more than a few miles from home. The water tasted funny, they murmured; they couldn’t sleep in a strange bed; they were worried that they’d left the coffee on, worried about their houseplants and their cats, worried that there would be a fire or someone would break into their houses or that the End of the World would happen while they were away. They would have to use commodes in filling stations—commodes which were filthy, with no telling what diseases on them. People in strange restaurants didn’t care about Libby’s saltfree diet. And what if the car broke down? What if somebody got sick?

“We’re going in August,” said Edie. “To Charleston. On a tour of historic homes.”

“You’re driving?” Though Edie refused to admit it, her eyesight was not what it had been and she sailed through red lights, turning left against traffic and jerking to dead stops as she leaned over the back seat to chat with her sisters—who, hunting through their pocketbooks for tissues and peppermints, were as sweetly oblivious as Edie herself to the exhausted, hollow-eyed guardian angel who hovered with lowered wings above the Oldsmobile, averting fireball collisions at every turn.

“All the ladies from our church circle are going,” Edie said, crunching busily on her toast. “Roy Dial, from the Chevrolet dealership, is lending us a bus. And a driver. I wouldn’t mind taking my car if people out on the highway didn’t act so nutty these days.”

“And Libby said she would go?”

“Certainly. Why shouldn’t she? Mrs. Hatfield Keene and Mrs. Nelson McLemore and all her friends are going.”

“Addie, too? And Tat?”

“Certainly.”

“And they want to go? Nobody’s making them?”

“Your aunts and I aren’t getting any younger.”

“Listen, Edie,” said Harriet abruptly, swallowing a mouthful of biscuit. “Will you give me ninety dollars?”

“Ninety dollars?” said Edie, suddenly ferocious. “Certainly not. What in the world do you want ninety dollars for?”

“Mother let our membership at the Country Club lapse.”

“What can you possibly want over at the Country Club?”

“I want to go swimming this summer.”

“Make that little Hull boy take you as his guest.”

“He can’t. He’s only allowed to bring a guest five times. I’m going to want to go more than that.”

“I don’t see the point in giving the Country Club ninety dollars just to use the pool,” said Edie. “You can swim in Lake de Selby all you like.”

Harriet said nothing.

“It’s funny. Camp’s late starting up this year. I would have thought the first session had already started.”

“I guess not.”

“Remind me,” said Edie, “to make a note to call down there this afternoon. I don’t know what’s wrong with those people. I wonder when the little Hull boy is going?”

“May I be excused?”

“You never did tell me what you’re doing today.”

“I’m going down to the library to sign up for the reading program. I want to win it again.” Now, she thought, was not the time to explain her true goal for the summer, not with Camp de Selby hovering over the conversation.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Edie said, standing to take her coffee cup to the sink.

“Do you mind if I ask you something, Edie?”

“Depends what it is.”

“My brother was murdered, wasn’t he?”

Edie’s eyes slid out of focus. She set the cup down.

“Who do you think did it?”

Edie’s gaze wavered for a moment and then—all at once—sharpened angrily on Harriet. After an uncomfortable instant (during which Harriet practically felt the smoke rising off her, as if she was a pile of dry wood chips smoldering in a beam of light) she turned and put the cup in the sink. Her waist looked very narrow and her shoulders very angular and military in the navy blue suit.

“Get your things,” she said, crisply, her back still turned.

Harriet didn’t know what to say. She didn’t have any things.

————

After the excruciating silence of the car ride (staring at the stitching on the upholstery, fiddling with a piece of loose foam on the armrest) Harriet didn’t especially feel like going to the library. But Edie waited stonily at the curb, and Harriet had no choice but to walk up the stairs (stiffly, conscious of being watched) and push open the glass doors.